Struggling to Learn USX as a Natural DSX Player, Looking for Technical Feedback

Technique Critique
#42

I’m not sure this is true, as far as actual licks go (not talking about the super vertical quasi-tapping motion). If you clock the fast playing in the Still of the Night and Shawn 4s and 5s vids, it’s almost exactly the same speed as what Troy did at the start of this video with typical leading edge grip, from what I believe is 20+ years ago. It’s all somewhere around sextuplets at 140, 16ths at 210.

https://youtu.be/YKUhlsc5fEI?si=YN3mwhckkZxDUc2t

That said, if anyone likes the feel of trailing edge, by all means, enjoy! I just don’t think it confers any actual magic ability boost unless leading edge is uncomfortable due to reasons of hand geometry.

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#43

Okay fair enough, maybe those were bad examples. I linked the video here at some 250bpm 16ths (RDT this time):

What about all the stuff in the RDT video about metal players using trailing edge for high speeds? I thought the whole point was the wrist movement used with a trailing edge grip is closer aligned to the true RDT path the hand can make etc.

#44

Maybe this is a boost in performance, but it’s hard to say. The amp shopping vid intro is 10-11 seconds straight of 16ths @ approximately 210, and it all looks pretty easy. The 250 vid is just one measure at a time… Troy might’ve been able to burst that out back in the day, as well, had he tried.

I’ll preface my response by saying that I think Troy is absolutely the man, and has had an incredibly massive impact on how we even think about technique. I’ve been following his work since before Cracking the Code was even officially a thing. But, you’ll see qualifiers like “in theory” thrown around a lot when talking about extreme RDT, and I know several long-time members here don’t get any performance boost from tall mouse over small mouse.

As for the trailing edge extreme metal guys, I still think this is just an outlier and they pick that way only because leading edge feels weird to them for whatever reason. For every one Dean Lamb from Archspire, there are multiple Dallas Toler-Wades and the guys from Suffocation.

Personal anecdote: a couple of years ago I had a student, and we developed a trailing edge technique for him. But this was clearly due to anatomical reasons - despite being relatively tall at around 6’1", he had proportionately short thumbs compared to the rest of his fingers. So, for him, trailing edge led to improved performance, but only because leading edge performance was basically impossible without discomfort.

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#45

Yeah, put me in this bag too. I’ve tried it, I’ve gotten it to work, I think I can go just as fast with leading edge (though it likely involves throwing in a little elbow).

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#46

Unlikely. I don’t think I could have just “tried more” with whatever technique I was using. I was already trying. The speed you see - whatever it was, I never measured it - is simply what ‘fast’ was with that technique.

I’m sure I and plenty of other people serendipitously used very fast motions in everyday life while knocking on doors or tapping on tables. And for obvious reasons we never thought to calculate their equivalent alternate picking speeds while doing the dishes.

But on an actual guitar, the posture that allows those motions to actually play a string creates obvious garage spikes with most ways you would normally think of to hold a pick. This prevents you from getting through the string and forces you to stop. This is the gating factor: discoverability. The combinations that work are simply not obvious.

There’s a really great old Dallas Toler-Wade video where he switches from obvious RDT to obvious DT in the 240+ range. When switching to the DT motion he even says “Sometimes I gotta break out this table…” I assume he means, like resting on the body like a table. As best we can tell, these are basically the two forms that will align the fastest axes with the strings. A regular person is not very likely to accidentally figure out these two rather uncommon guitar postures and motions. That’s why these players are so cool:

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#47

Elbow is probably the most easily discoverable ‘fast’ motion. Miles Dimitri Baker does it in his interview and easily gets near 300bpm while laughing about it, like a one-off “here’s a funny thing I can do”:

Notably I can’t do it, although I haven’t spent huge amounts of time trying. Elbow may be the obvious one for a lot of people but even that is not a universal rule. There are “can’t figure out elbow” players too, and I am one of them.

My point is just that discoverability and execution are really big problems with all these motions. There is some combination of overall form that aligns the joint motion with the strings in a way that could actually play a note. Then there is some feeling of producing the right muscle activation that causes the joint to move.

And after all that, if your pick grip is such that the orientation will not get through the strings, garage spikes will feel like resistance and you may be forced to stop. And the same grip does not necessarily produce the same results with all players, even when the rest of the form looks basically the same. This is obvious from Magnet footage. It looks like relative differences in finger lengths or maybe hand shape are the reason, though we can’t yet point to any obvious “you have DWPS thumb length” factors.

We have a healthy respect for just how difficult it is to: “know” what the correct technique is, know that your particular body type can actually achieve the necessary posture and grip, and then to actually trick yourself into making the muscles do the thing. None of this is a given!

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#48

I’m very much convinced there’s some Star Trek VI – Undiscovered Country here, by the by. I recently made some instant progress by changing where on the thumb I was holding the pick. I’d thought I had short thumbs, turns out maybe not so much :laughing:

#49

Progress in terms of what? There are relatively few small-picture changes which produce super obvious big-picture results. But when they exist, it’s usually things like, this small change allows me to use different posture B, or different joint motoin C, and that is now the thing which works a lot better. That kind of thing.

1 Like
#50

I wasn’t going to bug you with details :laughing: , but the tl;dr is:

I’m a wrist RDT player (Tom can confirm that I’m not hallucinating this). Moving the pick a little ways down the thumb (toward the… DIP joint?) made a big difference (think contemporary Rusty Cooley or Andy Wood rather than “minimal effort”).

I think it has more to do with pickslant than anything else; it enables slight wrapping without pain, and I could almost instantly perform what feels like wrist DBX with much less 2WPS than I had been using before.

#51

Sure, anything is possible. This is a “needs more video” situation which I’d be happy to look at on the platform.

In general, I’m not wedded to any particular pick grip and wil will soon replace the current lesson with a very brief overview of the categories players use. The goal is just to allow new players to say, “Aha, that’s what George Benson is doing” but not to make any specific recommendation about what people should do.

Then the “do this” instructions will live in a series of very short hands-on videos with instructions for recreating various motions. The current “wrist-forearm” lesson sequence is a good example. It completely ignores the pick grip lesson and shows you what is essentially the only possible pick grip given the form this technique uses.

This format is probably more to the point. It avoids trying to systematize “how grips work” and instead uses the more immediate “do this”. If it doesn’t work given someone’s hand geometry then it doesn’t work. But it gets there much more quickly.

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#52

I’d be curious to see how fast 2nps ideas are with the tall RDT or elbow form, as well as swiping and pick displacement ideas. Also I wonder if pick displacement and swiping can be deliberately practiced like everything else.

#53

You mention in your post that you came to your conclusions by reading science. Fair enough, but you’ve come to erroneous conclusions.

Your biggest issue is that you’ve made a mistake with regards to the wrist. If you look at the musculature of the forearm (which are the muscles that allow for the articulation of the wrist joint) you’ll notice that forearm is very asymmetrical; you can’t break wrist motion down into two pure categories of movement like flexion/extension and deviation the way you do. The muscles interact in complex ways to create those two movements; deviation is a compound movement.

Troy introduced the concept of dart thrower motion (and reverse dart thrower motion) to the vocabulary of guitar technique by collaborating with physiologists who have indicated that the motion that the wrists are basically evolved to do most efficiently is the dart thrower motion. Troy noticed that a lot of guitarists use a motion that’s a mirror symmetry of the dart thrower motion and coined the term reverse dart thrower.

You also reference the “degrees of freedom problem” in basically the opposite of how Nikolai Bernstein observed it, by the way: he noted that learners early in the process of becoming skillful in a motion reduced the amount of variables by freezing all the wider degrees of freedom and that as they improved, those degrees became looser as the brain learned how to recreate the same motion outcome with variability in the exact motions moved. The brain does not fix on “the first workable motion” it finds; it is instead constantly optimising the motion over time.

I highly suggest you look into the Ecological Dynamics Approach to motor control and read the works of Rob Gray (How We Learn To Move and Learning To Optimise Movement) because while I don’t think you’ve come up with a bad system, the ways you are trying to explain and justify said system don’t agree with all the literature available and, in cases, outright contradicts it.

4 Likes
#55

Still working on EJ cascading licks. I’m trying different picks and also trying to push the speed a bit (sorry, the playing is far from clean or perfect, no edits).

Is my right-hand position okay? I feel more comfortable like that, but it may not be the most academic.

I’m also still hesitating between playing with a Jazz III or a triangle 356. I’m using a BlueChip TAD60 and a primetone triangle here. I love the glide of the triangle, but the Jazz III feels more precise on the high strings. When I try one type I feel that this is it, I find the right one… until I try the other type, and again and again :laughing:

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#56

Are you a lefty, or is the video mirrored?

I’m not a big EJ fan so I can’t really say much other than that you’re sounding great - sounds plenty clean to me!

Ultimately I don’t think the specific pick matters, and I think that trying a bunch of different picks will overall improve your playing until you home in on the exact one you think is best tonally for this style of play.

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#57

Thank you :grin:
No I’m right handed it’s mirrored